Did You Know This Is The Best Lower Body Exercise Ever?

Shelton Personal Training Studio Reveals the Best Lower Body Exercise Ever.

As personal fitness trainers, we get a lot of questions regarding “What exercises are best for my legs?” Specifically, the butt and thighs, tend to be one of the most common areas of concern on the lower body. Today we are going to share our personal favorite lower body exercise and all of its awesome variations. It’s called the Bulgarian Split Squat. This exercise is so effective that you’ll pretty much make your body thunder-thigh proof once you master it!

Before we get into this, one thing we definitely don’t want to do is feed into the idea of individual body part training and spot reduction on certain areas of the body. As you should know by now we are firm believers in total body training, meaning that we train the upper body, lower body, and core during every single workout. By training the whole body at once we maximally stimulate lean muscle gain and metabolism and promote total body fat burning in order to effectively eliminate the body fat that is hiding in those areas that people are having trouble seeing. Yep the stubborn fat areas that prevent a good body from becoming a great body. Plus, a diet high in lean protein, fiber, and green veggies and low in unnatural fats and refined sugars and starches is of course a pre-requisite if you want to see your muscles show up in a good way. It is also important to know that you lose fat in a genetically predetermined way. You can do all the crunches you want but without total body training, proper eating habits, and enough time to get to those stubborn fat areas you will never see your abs, lose those jiggly arms, or get rid of that junk in the trunk.

Moving onto the main event: we revealed above the world’s greatest lower body exercise. Our favorite leg exercises are any sort of lunge variation because we prefer single leg exercise in lieu of their double leg counterparts for a lot of reasons. For people with back issues, single leg exercises allow them to safely perform lower body exercises without putting their lower lumbar spine in jeopardy of hyper flexion or excessive rounding that can cause back spasms in the short run and herniated discs in the long run. Furthermore, we feel there’s often such a strength and/or flexibility imbalance between one leg and the other for most people that it’s critical to address one leg at a time to really shore up the weak links from the start.

Our favorite single leg lunge variation is the Bulgarian Split Squat. Here is how you perform it. Basically we’re going to elevate the back foot on a bench, box, or any other sturdy foot support, usually about 12-18 inches high. You’ll put your front leg well in front of you in order to make sure that your front knee and ankle are lined up. In general, we tell people to exaggerate how far you put your front leg forward so that the front knee is almost slightly behind the ankle as this really helps reduce sheer force on the knees. Initiate the exercise by loading the front heel and dropping your hips as low as you can in a pain-free range of motion while staying really tall up top with a proud chest and shoulders down and back. Finish the rep by explosively driving through your front heel to return to the top of the movement. You can start with body weight only to ensure the front thigh is parallel to the floor or lower depth and then progress by adding speed of movement, jumping, or by adding dumbbells. You can even incorporate some very cool combination movements with this lower body exercise like adding a curl to press at the top of the movement or doing a single arm shoulder press to really challenge your core and single-leg balance and stability.

We have yet to find an exercise that hits the legs as hard as this baby does. In particular, it really helps strengthen your vastus medialis muscle, that inner quad muscle that looks like a teardrop, that’s heavily responsible for tracking your patella and keeping your knee caps in line. So if you have a history of overtraining or patella-femoral issues this exercise is phenomenal for keeping your knees as bulletproof as possible.

The Bulgarian Split Squat also provides a very good stretch for the hip flexor of your back leg, an area that is often very tight, especially for guys. Any exercise that allows you to simultaneously stretch and strengthen your body is priceless. Don’t waste another moment with the useless inner-outer thigh machine and get off your but and crank it with the world’s best lower body exercise today!